Always Exploring

A tribute to the real stormchasers 6-6-13

It was an interesting week for storm chasing and storm chasers alike. The week started out with some very hard news about the death of 3 incredible storm chasers and researchers, with a cumulative 40+ years of chasing experience. There names are Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young, taken by the EF5 tornado in El Reno Ok on 5-31-13.

When the news hit, my Facebook exploded with confusion and sadness from storm chasers across the world. We can no longer say that a storm chaser has never been killed in a tornado. Besides the loss of future research, the incident made each of the storm chasers and their family members contemplate the safety of our passion, and we were faced with the grim reality that we are not invincible.

Here is one tribute from the stormchasers. When we chase, sometimes the only way people can keep track of us and our safety is through spotternetwork.org, and so we all manually set our locations to spell out the initials of the lost.

And here is a link to the CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/02/us/midwest-weather/index.html